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The Monoliths Next Door

Sachem's Head, Conn. - IT began with a one-liner, a throwaway, a joke: how would you get Stonehenge past a zoning board?

Jonathan Rothberg, a scientist who has developed, among other things, an efficient way to sequence the human genome using fireflies and a microchip, posed that question after his plans for a zinc-clad observatory designed by Cesar Pelli were swatted down following a local zoning hearing for, among other reasons, not looking sufficiently colonial.

One September morning Dr. Rothberg, 42, was standing inside the most striking result of that painful hearing: his own personal Stonehenge, made of massive Norwegian granite slabs planted on 11 acres overlooking Long Island Sound. The stones, all 700 tons of them, glinted in the sun, their blue-black faces polished as smooth as glass and embellished with nooks and crannies by their sculptor, Darrell Petit, so that each was as distinct as a fingerprint.

"It might be that you couldn't build Stonehenge because you can't get the stones," Dr. Rothberg said, recalling the months after his dreams for the observatory went pffft. "It might be that the technologies are lost. Or it might be that you'd get lost in legal hassles. Anyway, I wanted to know."

In 2001 Dr. Rothberg bought the land, the site of a former quarry, to build a home for himself; his wife, Bonnie Rothberg, a physician and Ph.D. candidate in epidemiology at Yale; and their three children, Jordana, Noah and Elana, now 9, 6 and 4. It was a scrubby basin with a rocky knoll at its south end and a little turfed sliver at the north end with a low-slung pink cement house. They began batting ideas around for a new house with Mr. Pelli, who is based nearby in New Haven. "Everything they drew was 20,000 square feet," said Bonnie Rothberg, 36, explaining that she is not the mansion type. "We had a huge impasse."

By the summer of 2003 the family was living in the little pink house, mired in the design phase of the new house, when Mars fever hit: the Internet lit up with bulletins that August about the planet's closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years. Jonathan Rothberg bought an 11-inch telescope and stuck it on the lawn.

"And then one day it rained," his wife said, "and we hauled it inside, where it's still sitting because it was so hard to move, and Jonathan thought, 'Wouldn't it be neat to build an observatory?"'

The Rothbergs gave Mr. Pelli a new assignment. His observatory, a zinc and wood cylinder with windows in the shape of the Gemini zodiac symbol, Jordana's birth sign, would rise to 35 feet, the local limit for structures.

Sachem's Head, a municipal entity of Guilford, Conn., has its own board, the Sachem's Head Association, representing roughly 115 homeowners, and its own zoning commission. The zoning rules say nothing about observatories, so the commission held a hearing on the design. As the room began to fill, Dr. Rothberg said, "I'm going, 'This is not good."'

Dr. Rothberg, who has already taken one company, CuraGen, public, went into sales mode. He painted a vivid picture of the scientific and educational opportunities to be gleaned from having one of the most powerful telescopes in New England right here in Sachem's Head.

Big mistake.

The second-most-vociferous objection to his telescope, after the one about the building's lack of colonialness, was about the possibility of a lot of "yellow school buses up here," he said.

"They didn't rule at the hearing," Dr. Rothberg said. "They came and toured the site. And then I got a little note one day. But I'm not bitter: you have to move on."

Today a 35-foot flagpole stands on the site of the planned observatory, as well as an octagonal gazebo. The knoll is strung with grapevines -- cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot and gewürztraminer. Dr. Rothberg left off peering into the heavens to peer into the genome and created another company, 454 Life Sciences, to produce his genome sequencer.

But he kept stewing and wondering. He bought a box of wooden children's blocks and built his vision -- a Stonehenge-like circle -- on the floor of his office. Jordana named it the Circle of Life. And then he called in the experts.

"My assignment was to arrange these stones to predict things to come," said Dr. Anthony Aveni, a professor of anthropology and astronomy at Colgate University, who laid out a plan that would chart sunrise and sunset on the first day of the seasons and other celestial events, along with the Rothberg children's birthdays.

"I think Jonathan did what old Cheops did," he said. "Why do you build a pyramid or the Taj Mahal, or Las Vegas for that matter? You do it because you want to make an imprint."

(The Circle of Life has a few rivals in this country, including an undistinguished concrete Stonehenge built in 1930 in Maryhill, Wash., and the deliciously giddy Carhenge, erected in 1987 in Alliance, Neb., from 38 cars planted mostly nose down in the dirt.)

Seven hundred tons of Blue Pearl Norwegian granite -- the amount needed to approximate the outermost slabs of Stonehenge, each about 6 by 13 feet -- makes an imprint. Its smoky blue-black crystals are coveted by the Chinese, who believe it has healing properties. The Stony Creek Quarry, whose meaty pink and black granite is the flesh of many Manhattan buildings, is just 20 minutes away in Branford, Conn., but it isn't big enough for a harvest of 700 tons, said Mr. Petit, 45, once a quarryman himself, who makes monumental pieces out of rough-hewn granite.

Mr. Petit may haunt a quarry for months or even years, noting enticing shapes and textures as they emerge during blasting. He and a crew of three spent three months in early 2004 in a Lundhs Labrador quarry near Larvik, Norway.

After the blocks were extracted Mr. Petit and his crew worked them over, grinding and polishing the surfaces. They were shipped to Connecticut that summer wrapped in indoor-outdoor carpet. Asked to give a price tag for his project, Dr. Rothberg demurred. "Art is priceless," he said.

He hopes it will be eternal, too. Dr. Rothberg gave his design and construction team an additional brief: he wanted the stones around for 10,000 years. "Ten thousand years is on the same order of magnitude as recorded history," he said.

It's likely that in 100 years the site will be under water, according to Pat Arnett, a senior engineer in New York at the consulting engineering firm of Robert Silman Associates. "But Jonathan was O.K. with that," said Mr. Arnett, whose firm designed a concrete mix for the foundations similar to those used by the ancient Romans.

Mr. Arnett used computer modeling to simulate natural stresses like enormous hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as ones on a more human scale. "It hadn't occurred to me, but Jonathan asked about vandals," he explained. "So I tested a dump truck running into the stones at 40 miles an hour. If someone is really intent on destroying the circle, it wouldn't be easy."

That July, when the stones were being raised, there were grumbles from some neighbors. In November an article in The New Haven Register said that the site was guarded by bees. (The Rothbergs' property, which includes the vineyard and an orchard, has a beehive too). The article also included a dismissive comment from Dolores Hayden, a Yale professor of architecture and American studies: "I don't think it fits into our New England sense of place."

"The issue is whether or not it's considered a structure," Ms. Hayden was also quoted as saying. "They did it without any kind of permit." Indeed, Dr. Rothberg sought no zoning approval or building permit because, he said, "my position is, if I put up a piece of art, I don't need permission."

The Sachem's Head Association has a new board president, Carl Swope, who is intent on bridging the gap between Dr. Rothberg and the neighbors.

"From the association's point of view, whether you perceive it as a structure, a monument or a piece of art is immaterial," Mr. Swope said. "Because it's substantial and because it's permanent, from the association's point of view, it's a structure and it needs to be permitted."

Mr. Swope is a conciliatory man, Dr. Rothberg said. He has persuaded Dr. Rothberg to sign a document, still being prepared, stating that his monument is a structure, and to receive a building permit after the fact.

"The Circle of Life inflamed some people living in the association because it came into existence without their explicit written permission," Dr. Rothberg said. "I like to say the polished surfaces act as a mirror to the souls. So some people that are not happy get ugly reflections."

Mr. Petit and Naomi Darling, a student in Yale's architecture school, were married amid the stones in August, their vows echoing among the slabs like a kettledrum in Carnegie Hall. A guest bought a divining rod, which vibrated like crazy during the service, he said.

Bonnie Rothberg is still waiting for a new house. While she had hoped for a soccer field instead of a monument, she did concede that the stones are nice to lean against on hot days.